Wireless devices such as personal digital assistants, cellular telephones, and the like can provide a platform for playing digital multimedia (e.g., audio and visual) content, such as music, news, sports reports, and other types of multimedia. In typical practice, the media is either downloaded to the device as a file for subsequent playout by the device or streamed to the device for real-time playout.
As one example, a growing trend in the cellular wireless realm is to provide mobile-television service. In operation, a service provider offering this service would provide wireless devices with a channel-listing in the form of an extensible markup language (XML) file, for instance, that lists various available content channels, including for each a channel name and a respective Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that points to the relevant channel content on the network. Each wireless device may then be programmed with program logic through which a user of the device can view the channel listing and select a desired channel to receive. When the user selects a channel, the device would then send a content request seeking the content from the designated URI. For mobile-television service or other content, each URI may be a Real Time Streaming Protocol URI (as described in the Internet Draft entitled “draft-ietf-mmusic-rfc2326bis-16.txt”, submitted by H. Schulzrinne et al., dated Nov. 19, 2007, the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference) or may take some other form. The service provider may then deliver the requested television content by streaming it in response to the wireless device, where it would be played out to the user as the device receives it. Other types of media could be delivered in other ways.
In a typical arrangement, client stations will be served by an access-channel provider, or access provider, that will provide the client stations with network connectivity through which the client stations can request and receive media content. For instance, cellular wireless devices may be served by a cellular service provider that operates a radio access network through which the devices can communicate on a packet-switched network such as the Internet. A media content provider, such as a mobile television provider for instance, may then operate a media server on the packet-switched network.
Through this arrangement, the content provider may transmit to the client stations (e.g., as packet-data transmission, an SMS transmission, or in some other manner) a content-listing that specifies available content items and that designates for each content item a respective URI. In turn, a user of a client station may view the listing and select a desired content item, and the client station may responsively generate and transmit a content request seeking the selected content item. Such a content request would likely pass from the client station through the access provider and in turn to the content provider. And the content provider would then deliver the requested content in response to the client station.